


vacant

by chatona



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Spoilers, all the feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-07
Updated: 2012-08-07
Packaged: 2017-11-11 16:14:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/480406
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chatona/pseuds/chatona
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jackson loses himself more and more. Lost hours become lost days until he doesn’t have anything left. There is only the kanima and its need to please its master. Its not his because the kanima is a weapon, not an individual. It has no will. It is nothing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	vacant

**Author's Note:**

> So, I watched 2.11 (which, spoilers for that episode!) and all was darkness and despair and gloom and Jackson feels. This is the result.
> 
> Many thanks to Emma for looking this over and fixing my comma abuse.

Jackson Whittemore has it all: captain of the lacrosse team, captain of the swim team, a porsche, the hottest girlfriend, rich parents, and a perfect jawline. He’s at the top of the social food chain of the jungle of hormones and cliques and peer pressure that is high school.

 

He has it made.

 

**

 

_Adopted_ , they tell him, and he doesn’t understand. _It means that you’re not our biological son, Jackson, but we love you regardless._

 

He’s six, and the words stay with him. _Not ours_.

 

**

 

The swim team sucks.

 

**

 

There’s an aching need inside of him to be better, to prove himself worthy. It’s clawing at his chest, his heart beating too fast when he wakes from dreams of his parents, his real parents. He sees them walking away from him, most nights, their backs only, and no matter how much he shouts or runs to follow, he never reaches them and they never turn around.

 

Some nights, they do, and their faces are blank, perfectly blank. Those nights are the worst, are the ones when he wakes trembling and in cold sweat, dread like a lead weight in his stomach.

 

**

 

Coach Finstock makes Scott McCall co-captain. Jackson trains with the team three times a week, he stays behind twice a week for another hour or two or however long it will take him to perfect his stance, practice his throw, he puts in an extra practice every weekend, alone or with Danny.

 

Scott McCall turned into a werewolf and everything Jackson has worked so hard for falls into his lap.

 

**

 

Jackson clings to a thin veneer of sarcasm, disdain and anger. Everyone eats it up; they call him an asshole and he is, he knows that, but it’s better than people asking him how he feels about being adopted or whether he knows how lucky he is to be alive (they cut him out of his mother’s body, they had to cut him out of his mother’s dead body) and he pushes the first guy who sneers at the porsche and how he better be good or who knows, the Whittemores might take it away or give him back (like there’s anyone to give him back _to_ , there isn’t anyone) into a wall, an arm across his throat.

 

“Don’t you ever,” Jackson says, and he doesn’t know how to continue, but he must look murderous because the guy is babbling about how it won’t happen again, please, just, and Jackson drops him and walks.

 

**

 

If he isn’t the best, it means he isn’t good enough.

 

**

 

Jackson knows what Lydia looks like when she’s kissed someone; he’s put that look there often enough himself, mussed up her lipgloss and curled his fingers in her hair until the strands were out of place in a way she doesn’t usually allow because she is Lydia Martin and everything has to be perfect.

 

He thinks, later, that she must have wanted for him to know that she kissed someone else, because she isn’t careless enough with her appearance not to have realised.

 

**

 

That he gets accosted in the hallway by Scott McCall’s drug dealer (werewolf, he learns) is bad enough, but understandable. He provoked the guy, but no one should be able to scratch his neck bloody and poison him just by grabbing him and pushing him in a locker.

 

The hallucinations don’t help.

 

**

 

He dumps Lydia.

 

She used him as much as he used her, in much of the same way: a status symbol, a trophy, someone to fill the time with. They got along well, the sex was good, but sometimes he looks at her and doesn’t even know whether he likes her at all, whether she likes him.

 

He’s on his path to something better and he doesn’t need anyone to hold him back. He also doesn’t need anyone to cheat on him.

 

**

 

Jackson isn’t heroic. He never claimed to be.

 

He understands this, though: The hero of the story, that is who everyone loves. The hero is the one people look up to, the one who gets the girl, the one who rides off into the sunset and has it all, in the end.

 

Jackson isn’t heroic, but he carries Lydia’s lifeless body from the lacrosse field and shouts for help, the smell of her blood filling his lungs, and he helps Stiles mix up more of those molotov cocktails, ones that actually are self-inflaming, and he faces the alpha and does not piss his pants when the, the _thing_ snarls and he throws his cocktail. There’s blood on his shirt and he’s terrified, and he refuses any and all responsibility, but he does his part.

 

Why shouldn’t he be rewarded?

 

**

 

Danny looks at him, sometimes, like he’s got it figured out, but he never comments and that makes it bearable somehow. Danny doesn’t push.

 

If Jackson were to do something so horribly clichéd and trite as have a breakdown, he knows Danny would be there for him.

 

**

 

(Jackson has a breakdown. He cries on the lacrosse field, drunk and afraid—of being second best, of not being good enough, of losing what little he has to cling to and tell himself that his life is a satisfactory one, a good one. The life he’s supposed to be having.)

 

**

 

Derek gives him the bite.

 

**

 

Jackson wakes up alone, in freezing water, his shirt ripped apart and his jacket missing, but he’s alive and his wound is healed. He doesn’t remember Derek throwing him into the water, and when he looks around, Derek is nowhere to be found, but he’s alive so it must have worked.

 

He spends the days until the full moon exhiliarated.

 

The wolf will be a better, a stronger version of Jackson.

 

**

 

Wolves have packs. Wolves _belong_.

 

**

 

His body rejects the bite and he’s never had nosebleeds before, but now there’s black blood streaming from his nose, from his ears, and he thinks maybe he’s dying after all. Maybe this is killing him.

 

Derek doesn’t know what’s going on, either, nor does he stay around to find out.

 

**

 

He goes to bed alone. Nothing happens; nothing that he remembers.

 

(Later, Derek chains Erica and Boyd and Isaac up in an abandoned subway car and spends the entire night watching them. Jackson never hears about it and is, at that point, so far gone that he wouldn’t have asked _why weren’t you there for me like you were for them?_ anyway.)

 

**

 

Jackson stops.

 

Verbs are funny things. He doesn’t stop doing anything in particular, he just stops. _He_ stops. Jackson ends. Jackson becomes the kanima, but he doesn’t know.

 

He wakes for flashes of it. He sees blood on his hands and doesn’t remember leaving his room. He hears Stiles ask, beg Scott to just kill Jackson. “He has no one,” Scott tells Stiles and the reply comes quick and sure, “That’s his own fault.”

 

Somehow, Scott’s words cut a lot deeper.

 

**

 

Jackson has no one. He doesn’t even have parents.

 

**

 

Jackson loses himself more and more. Lost hours become lost days until he doesn’t have anything left. There is only the kanima and its need to please its master. _Its_ not _his_ because the kanima is a weapon, not an individual. It has no will. It is nothing.

 

Jackson is nothing.

 

**

 

Jackson would resent the situation and the people who could have prevented or mitigated it. He would resent Derek Hale, not for giving him the bite, but not for staying with him long enough to make sure that he’s all right, that it takes; for not even trying to figure out what he is becoming if not a werewolf, for biting him and then not considering him pack for even just one second.

 

He would resent Stiles for so loudly advocating that they just kill Jackson.

 

He would resent Scott, for being a werewolf where Jackson isn’t—and for showing Jackson a modicum of care, for at least giving a shit whether Jackson lives or dies because no one else does and of course, Scott not only gets to be a werewolf but also the good guy, the hero of the story.

 

He would resent his parents for dying. (This, he’s actually done most of his life, so it wouldn’t be anything new.)

 

He would resent his adoptive parents for not managing to make him feel like he belongs, for not giving him the base of care and love to fall back on that people like Stiles and Scott, for all that they only have one parent left, seem to take for granted, the base level he sees in the interaction of Danny with his family.

 

He would resent Matt for making him kill and kill and kill and kill, over and over.

 

He would, if there was anything of Jackson left.

 

**

 

He has lucid moments. Flashes of clarity.

 

He doesn’t know what is going on. He can barely hold on to his sense of self even when he becomes aware of where he is (the school, the lacrosse field, driving the porsche).

 

He understands this: he is dangerous. He is killing people. (It would be better if he were dead.)

 

**

 

“You don’t want me there.”

 

Lydia tells him she’ll see him at the party and he wonders if she’ll die, if he’ll kill her. He doesn’t know what he is or how he kills people, but he knows it must be true. He’s dangerous.

 

Lydia doesn’t take the out he offered her and he can’t help himself from wanting to hang on to the warmth of her hand. He’s so cold these days.

 

**

 

He is dangerous, out of control, and losing his sense of self. He is helpless.

 

He most definitely is not good enough.

 

**

 

Jackson would resent himself for not being stronger than this, for letting a stupid teenager with issues (drowning when he was nine, really? Yeah, it must have sucked, but keep it together, man) take over his mind so completely. He should be able to beat this.

 

He should be stronger than this.

 

He would resent himself (that, too, would be nothing new), except there isn’t anything of himself left.

 

**

 

Danny is calling his name and Jackson becomes aware for a brief moment: locker room, before a game. He can’t explain, already feels the pull of control (no longer Matt but someone else) wash over him, and Danny wouldn’t be able to help him even if he did. Danny can’t save him.

 

He can almost believe that at least Danny would try. No one else has.

 

So he tells Danny to stay in the goal, to run the other way, and it’s the last thing he says.

 

**

 

The last thing he thinks is _please don’t let me harm him, please don’t let me hurt anyone else_ and then blankness descends over him again.

 

Jackson stops.

 

**

 

Jackson has never been a caring person. He never asked for a pet; he didn’t want the responsibility. Maybe that’s just his personality or maybe being adopted messed something up inside of him somehow (it did, but maybe not this, who knows), but the thought of caring for someone or something makes him feel sick.

 

He is responsible for the deaths of too many people; for the most part he feels nothing because he is not Jackson, he is kanima, revenge, _nothing_.

 

**

 

He wishes things had gone differently.

 

There’s another lucid moment, but no epiphany comes with it. He doesn’t think back to any moment in his life and realise, _that’s where I went wrong_. He thinks _I don’t deserve this_ and _maybe they should have killed me,_ and he feels something clawing in his chest, terrible and painful and he thinks again, _I don’t deserve it_.

 

He knows he’s never been a particularly nice person, but he used to be human. If anything, his epiphany is this: no one cares. If anything, people care that he’s still alive. No one, not Stiles and not Allison and not Scott who argued against killing, none of the ones who _know_ bothered asking if he’s all right.

 

**

 

Instead of killing anyone else, he plunges his claws into his own side. The last remnant of his lucid moment is pain and paralysis.

 

**

 

Jackson stops.  

 

 

 


End file.
